It’s not enough these days to just run a social media account for business. In order to stand out in the crowd of brands present on social media channels, it’s important to be a social influencer, rather than an influencee. You want your fans and followers to learn from you and share your content. You want them to trust you and your brand. Why else would they choose you over your many competitors? So rather than being a social media poster, you need to be a social influencer. Here’s how.

Be Present and Be Seen

It’s crucial to know where your customers are, and to be there. Obviously. Market research will tell you which social channels your demographic frequents, and you can set up your social media profiles accordingly. You have to go a step further, however, and figure out which social media platforms are applicable to the types of content you plan to share. High-level thought leadership in long form is best for LinkedIn, while informational visual posts are great for Facebook. Not the other way around, in Facebook’s case. You also don’t want to share a bunch of infographics on Instagram. DO some research to find out what content performs best on which platforms.

Engage and Be Useful

In some cases, engaging with fans and followers will be easy. They’ll post questions and feedback and you can answer them quickly and thoughtfully. That’s a great practice to get into, but it’s best to have an engagement plan that doesn’t solely consist of putting out customer service fires. There are other things you can do to increase engagement on your social media accounts. Here are some ideas:

Facebook Live Videos – you can simply talk to your audience and let them get to know your face, your voice, and your brain.

Ask Good Questions – You can post a question to your social audience to let them know that you care about the things they think. Bonus if you include a great visual

Let Users Know You Care About More Than Business – Encourage your social audience to get on board with a charitable cause that you care about. Working together towards something greater will make everyone feel good.

By showing your social audience who you are and what your brand is about, you’ll establish a strong presence and people will see you as a thought leader and influencer.

Get The Word Out About Your Thought Leadership

In order to be a true influencer, you have to be a thought leader. And, you have to be everywhere your audience is. That means you have to have a presence, not only on social media, but on your own website and on industry-related blogs. Start by compiling a list of websites that publish blog posts like the ones you will write on your own blog. Then compile a list of websites that your competitors and other thought leaders in your industry publish content on. It’s likely that you will see a lot of common websites in among the two lists. Then, pick several and reach out to the editorial staff to pitch a post you’d like to write for the site.

A few tips on this. Make sure you reference a recent post that you liked and tell them why. If you’ve been published other places, provide links. And, pitch 3-4 potential titles. If they say no at first, move on to the next website on the list. You can always try again later. As you publish more content other places, you can always revisit the sites that said no.

Publish Awesome and Contextual Content

Your social media content has to, in a word, be better than anyone else’s. It must be visually stunning, completely contextual, and timed to show up in social feeds at the time people want to see it. PromoRepublic understands that, and that is why we’ve provided a fantastic social media posting tool that provides you with relevant, timely content based on holidays, events and trends. Our packed content calendar has loads of pre-designed templates for a number of days every week. Just pop in your logo and you’re ready to go. Or, if you have an idea you want to create, you can easily do it in our native graphics editor. We make it easy to shine on social networks.

To be an effective social influencer, you have to understand what your customers or potential customers are looking for and deliver it smartly, kindly and timely.